At Ebola Training Session in New York, Calm and Caution Are Urged

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Thousands of health care workers in New York City learned precautions for handling Ebola patients, including a demonstration of how to put on and remove protective clothing.Published OnOct. 22, 2014CreditImage by Ángel Franco/The New York Times

As thousands of health care workers watched raptly, a federal government doctor clad in a green impermeable gown, bootees and a face shield that looked like a welder’s mask demonstrated the latest protocols for fighting Ebola at a huge training session in New York on Tuesday.

It was the highlight of a conference at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan that brought together janitors, security guards, doctors, nurses and other workers from hospitals across the city who have been anticipating the possible arrival of the virus in New York and wondering whether they are sufficiently trained and equipped to deal with it.

The session, more than three hours, turned out to be part pep rally and part training conference, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio kicked off events with speeches that took pains to pay tribute to 1199 S.E.I.U., the powerful health care workers union that was one of the organizers.

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Health care workers in New York watched a demonstration on protective gear and protocols for treating Ebola patients on Tuesday.CreditÁngel Franco/The New York Times

“What’s going to kill this disease is knowledge, is training, is preparation,” Mr. Cuomo said.

The governor said he remembered anthrax in 2001, the advent of H.I.V. in the 1980s and even the discovery of Ebola in 1976, the year he turned 19, adding, in a Wikipedia-like note, that “it was named for a river in the Congo.”

He vowed New York would be different from Dallas, where two nurses have contracted the virus after caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died on Oct. 8, because New York had more time to prepare.

“Keep the anxiety down, keep the fear down, because it’s unnecessary,” Mr. Cuomo told the workers who filled the hangar-style convention center. “It’s not right, and it only makes the situation more complex for all of us to deal with.”

But the demonstration of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., was what most workers in the audience had been waiting for. Protective techniques had been evolving rapidly and had been updated only the night before by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bryan Christensen, a doctor on the C.D.C.’s Domestic Infection Control Team for the Ebola Response, stood onstage, his image broadcast on giant screens, to convey the latest details. Demonstrating the kind of buddy system that the C.D.C. recommends, he posed as the “trained observer” who made sure the nurse onstage with him correctly put on and took off her equipment.

“Margins of safety” was his buzz phrase, repeated again and again. Even gloved hands should be disinfected with alcohol rub, a new requirement to add a margin of safety, he said.

Officials advised that while some layers of protection were good, too many layers were bad, because they made it more difficult to work and to take off the layers, increasing the risk of contamination.

In answer to questions from the audience about what kind of cleaning solutions would work against Ebola, officials said while the virus was technically an “enveloped” virus, the best approach was to observe a margin of safety by using a solution approved for “non-enveloped” viruses. A solution marked as effective against norovirus would work, they said.

“Practice, practice, practice,” was the other mantra, as officials said that watching a demonstration was not enough.

The telephone is “one of the most powerful weapons” was yet another aphorism, delivered several times in so many words by Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, the C.D.C.’s associate director for preventing health-care-related infections. By that, Dr. Srinivasan explained, he meant that patients should be questioned before they got to the hospital, the urgent care center or the pharmacy about whether they had traveled during the previous month to Ebola-ridden countries like Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. (The incubation period for the disease is three weeks.)

With that precaution in mind, dispatchers in the city’s 911 system are now asking callers with Ebola-like symptoms about their travel histories.

New York State has designated eight hospitals as primary treatment centers for Ebola, though all hospitals are expected to have at least one isolation room that could handle a case.

Five of the hospitals are in New York City: Bellevue Hospital Center, the city’s flagship public hospital; Montefiore Medical Center; Mount Sinai; NewYork-Presbyterian; and North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System.

New York has not seen a citywide health care training session of such magnitude since the post-Sept. 11 anthrax scares, according to a spokesman for the Greater New York Hospital Association, which sponsored the event with 1199 and Kaiser Permanente’s Partnership for Quality Care.

Chartered buses brought workers from some hospitals. Several health care workers in the audience said they had received similar training at their jobs, but appreciated the extra instruction.

Gloria Gonzalez, 25, a patient care associate at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in Manhattan, said she had quickly found a babysitter when she was invited to attend. “We don’t expect anything to be 100 percent bulletproof,” she said. “But at least we understand what to expect.”

The event was not without its moments of levity. Asked whether large gloves would be available for people with big hands, Dr. Mary Bassett, the New York City health commissioner, stopped midsentence to say she felt as if she was talking about “some other latex materials.”

And as dozens of news photographers clustered around the P.P.E. demonstration, Dr. Christensen said, with a mix of bravado and plaintiveness, “When you do this in your hospital, hopefully there won’t be this many cameras and people watching.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Caution and Calm Urged at Ebola Training Session. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe